Duza's "Jesus Freaks" Merges Zombie, Conspiracy Genres

Andre Duza's zombie novel Jesus Freaks is more than a work of horror fiction. A strange hybrid of horror, conspiracy, and science fiction it is best placed with underground classics such as Moorcock's "Jerry Cornelius Chronicles," Wilson and Shea's "Illuminatus! Trilogy," and Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49."

Jesus Freaks is Duza's vision of the not-to-distant future, in which the dead have come back to life, eating the flesh of the living. A mysterious plane crash throws detective Philip Makane into the center of events which spiral further and further out of control from there on. Add to that the ceaseless rainfall of what DNA testing reveals to be human blood - the arrival of two individuals who possess super human powers; they who both claim to be Jesus. Complicating things further is a demonic entity named "Boring," which is determined to corrupt and invert the survivors' efforts to maintain - much less - restore those aspects of human existence which are decent and noble.

Published by Deadite Press, Jesus Freaks is a worthwhile read. Thoroughly developed, believable characters move through a tightly controlled, fast-paced plot which takes place in setting which is graphically terrifying and strangely fascinating and enticing.

Like the author, the novel's protagonist Philip "Kane" Makane, is a black man who grew up in what he calls the "ass end of Philadelphia, PA." Kane is a hardened cop, but not even he is prepared for the chaos and nearly unimaginable violence that is thrown upon the world less than ten pages into the novel. Kane is complex, often conflicted character, who in the course of his career has already seen more violence and ugliness than most people ever will. He is caring, cruel, thoughtful, tough, heroic and withdrawn - and this is what makes him an especially fascinating character. Like most of the survivors, he finds it extremely difficult to come to terms with the fact that the flesh eating zombies aren't human anymore, especially since the transition from human to zombie is a gradual one; one doesn't simply die and wake up undead. Initially, a zombie retains fine motor skills and even the capability to speak and reason; they lose these abilities over time. Unlike most survivors, Kane greets the power struggle between the two self-proclaimed Messiahs with cynicism. Most choose to follow one or the other. And most of those choose the one who has aligned himself with America's most influential televangelist, the Reverend Jesse James Dallas. The other, a sickly Mid-Eastern figure is supported by a sort-of Rainbow Coalition.

Essential to the zombie subgenre is the element of graphic gore. Readers of Jesus Freaks will not be disappointed. There are plenty of flesh eating human have-beens, ripping meat from bone, clicking their teeth, overrunning one bastion of human civilization after another. Most of the time, Duza's zombies are frightening and disgusting, as they should be. At other times, however, they are comical. Chapter 7, for instance, opens with the animated, psychically controlled corpse of Raymond Lee, a Kung-Fu Christian Evangelist who is gearing up for his television ministry comeback.

Footage of the new, living-dead Raymond Lee striking a few mock-karate poses. However rigid they may have looked before, it was nothing compared to the way he moved now, like an animatronic funhouse prop stuck on vibrate. His face which they tried in vain to conceal with oversized shades and B-movie prosthetics, was no more than a few patches of grey flesh in an expanse of bone.

(187) Then there are passages when his zombies assume a lyrical, poetic nature and transcend the expected template. No longer are they merely representative of our animalistic fear of the predator, the hungry pack of wolves, as they were in Romero's Night of the Living Dead. And no longer are they a metaphor of the destructive power of conformity, as in Dawn of the Dead. In Duza's novel, the zombies embody spiritual deadness and an eternally futile struggle against entropy:

Languishing in waking death, knowing only existence and hunger, they marched along with muddled determination through barren cornfields, along lonely backcountry roads, and interstate expressways that still saw occasional traffic, through long-dead factory towns, and even waist-deep pools of blood left over from the rain ...

(198)

Like all zombie stories, the book lacks a sense of closure. But that is the nature of the genre. Death is the end of all things, but in a world where there is no death, only decay, nothing can truly end.